The present disclosure relates generally to videoconferencing systems, and more particularly, to a system for optimizing bandwidth utilization in a multi-participant full mesh peer-to-peer video session.
A full mesh peer-to-peer video conference is achieved by setting up independent audio/video real-time transport protocol (“RTP”) streams between each participant of the conference such that each participant transmits one audio, video, and possibly content stream to each other participant and receives the same from each other participant, as shown in FIG. 2. The main advantage of a full mesh conference by way of comparison to the more traditional centralized bridge conference method (FIG. 1) is the lower latency of media and the elimination of bottlenecks in the form of centralized media servers. Setting up individual streams with each participant also allows the video conferencing clients the capability to independently compose the video, or to select which participant(s) it wants to send/receive the video. The main disadvantage of the full mesh approach is that a potentially larger amount of bandwidth is required to set up video streams to send and received video from every participant in the conference. The full-mesh approach limits the size of a given conference to around 3-4 participants depending on available bandwidth to clients.